Geraldine Ferraro - First Senate Run and Ambassadorship

First Senate Run and Ambassadorship

Ferraro had relinquished her House seat to run for the vice-presidency. Her new-found fame led to an appearance in a Diet Pepsi commercial in 1985. She published Ferraro: My Story, an account of the campaign with some of her life leading up to it, in November 1985. It was a best seller and earned her $1 million. She also earned over $300,000 by giving speeches. She founded the Americans Concerned for Tomorrow political action committee, which focused on getting ten women candidates elected in the 1986 Congressional elections (eight of whom would be successful). Despite the one-sided national loss in 1984, Ferraro was still viewed as someone with a bright political future. Many expected her to run in the 1986 United States Senate election in New York against first-term Republican incumbent Al D'Amato, and during 1985 she did Upstate New York groundwork towards that end. A senate candidacy had been her original plan for her career, before she was named to Mondale's ticket. But in December 1985, she said she would not run, due to an ongoing U.S. Justice Department probe on her and her husband's finances stemming from the 1984 campaign revelations.

Members of Ferraro's family were indeed facing legal issues. Her husband John Zaccaro had pleaded guilty in January 1985, to fraudulently obtaining bank financing in a real estate transaction and had been sentenced to 150 hours of community service. Then in October 1986, he was indicted on unrelated felony charges regarding an alleged 1981 bribery of Queens Borough President Donald Manes concerning a cable television contract. A full year later, he was acquitted at trial. The case against him was circumstantial, a key prosecution witness proved unreliable, and the defense did not have to present its own testimony. Ferraro said her husband never would have been charged had she not run for vice president. Meanwhile, in February 1986, the couple's son John had been arrested for possession and sale of cocaine. He was convicted, and in June 1988, sentenced to four months imprisonment; Ferraro broke down in tears in court relating the stress the episode had placed on her family. Ferraro worked on an unpublished book about the conflicting rights between a free press and being able to have fair trials. Asked in September 1987, whether she would have accepted the vice-presidential nomination had she known of all the family problems that would follow, she said, "More than once I have sat down and said to myself, oh, God, I wish I had never gone through with it ... I think the candidacy opened a door for women in national politics, and I don't regret that for one minute. I'm proud of that. But I just wish it could have been done in a different way."

Ferraro remained active in raising money for Democratic candidates nationwide, especially women candidates. During the 1988 presidential election, Ferraro served as vice chair of the party's Victory Fund. She also did some commentating for television. Ferraro was a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics from 1988 to 1992, teaching in-demand seminars such as "So You Want to be President?" She also took care of her mother, who suffered from emphysema for several years before her death in early 1990.

By October 1991, Ferraro was ready to enter elective politics again, and ran for the Democratic nomination in the 1992 United States Senate election in New York. Her opponents were State Attorney General Robert Abrams, Reverend Al Sharpton, Congressman Robert J. Mrazek, and New York City Comptroller and former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman. Abrams was considered the early front-runner. The D'Amato campaign feared facing Ferraro the most among these, as her Italian ancestry, effective debating and stump speech skills, and her staunch pro-choice views would eat into several of D'Amato's usual bases of support. Ferraro emphasized her career as a teacher, prosecutor, congresswoman, and mother, and talked about how she was tough on crime. Ferraro drew renewed attacks during the primary campaign from the media and her opponents over Zaccaro's finances and business relationships. She objected that a male candidate would not receive nearly as much attention regarding his wife's activities. Ferraro became the front-runner, capitalizing on her star power from 1984, and using the campaign attacks against her as an explicitly feminist rallying point for women voters. As the primary date neared, her lead began to dwindle under the charges, and she released additional tax returns from the 1980s to try to defray the attacks. Holtzman ran a negative ad accusing Ferraro and Zaccaro of taking more than $300,000 in rent in the 1980s from a pornographer with purported ties to organized crime. The final debates were nasty, and Holtzman in particular constantly attacked Ferraro's integrity and finances. In an unusual election-eve television broadcast, Ferraro talked about "the ethnic slur that I am somehow or other connected to organized crime. There's lots of innuendo but no proof. However, it is made plausible because of the fact that I am an Italian-American. This tactic comes from the poisoned well of fear and stereotype ..." On the September 15, 1992, primary, Abrams edged out Ferraro by less than a percentage point, winning 37 percent of the vote to 36 percent. Ferraro did not concede she had lost for two weeks.

Abrams spent much of the remainder of the campaign trying to get Ferraro's endorsement. Ferraro, enraged and bitter after the nature of the primary, ignored Abrams and accepted Bill Clinton's request to campaign for his presidential bid instead. She was eventually persuaded by state party leaders into giving an unenthusiastic endorsement with just three days to go before the general election, in exchange for an apology by Abrams for the tone of the primary. D'Amato won the election by a very narrow margin. The Ferraro-Holtzman fighting of the campaign was viewed as a disaster by many feminists, but overall the 1992 U.S. Senate elections saw so many victories that it became known as the "Year of the Woman".

Following the primary loss, Ferraro became a managing partner in the New York office of Keck, Mahin & Cate, a Chicago-based law firm. There she organized the office and spoke with clients, but did not actively practice law and left before the firm fell into difficulties. Ferraro's second book, a collection of her speeches, was titled Changing History: Women, Power and Politics and was published in 1993.

President Clinton appointed Ferraro as a member of the United States delegation to United Nations Commission on Human Rights in January 1993. She attended the June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna as the alternate U.S. delegate. Then in October 1993, Clinton promoted her to be United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, saying that Ferraro had been "a highly effective voice for the human rights of women around the world." The Clinton administration named Ferraro vice-chair of the U.S. delegation to the landmark September 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing; in this role she picked a strong team of experts in human rights issues to serve with her. During her stint on the commission, it for the first time condemned anti-Semitism as a human rights violation, and also for the first time prevented China from blocking a motion criticizing its human rights record. Regarding a previous China motion that had failed, Ferraro had told the commission, "Let us do what we were sent here to do—decide important questions of human rights on their merits, not avoid them." Ferraro held the U.N. position into 1996.